I have no objection to an opposition party scrutinising electoral rolls. It should. A voter omitted through administrative error suffers a real democratic injury, and the Election Commission must provide usable remedies. My objection begins when scrutiny is replaced by theatre: an allegation becomes a slogan, the slogan becomes a hashtag, and the hashtag is offered as proof. Congress’s campaign against voter-list revision increasingly follows that sequence. Public reporting on the dispute, including the Associated Press’s account of the protests, describes genuine anxiety about documentation and exclusions. Those concerns merit patient examination. They do not automatically establish a centrally directed plot to manufacture an election result.
I am old-fashioned about accusations with national consequences. Show the rolls, identify the constituencies, document the wrongful deletion, trace the complaint, and explain how officials responded. Then let courts, parties and citizens judge the record. What Congress too often offers instead is a grand conclusion first and an evidentiary treasure hunt later. That may animate a rally, but it is a poor way to defend electoral credibility. A party that wants to govern India should be able to distinguish an imperfect process from a stolen mandate.
The difference between suspicion and proof
Electoral rolls are untidy because India is untidy. People migrate, die, marry, change addresses, register twice, live in informal housing and possess documents containing different spellings of the same name. Any large revision will produce mistakes, disputed classifications and frightening individual stories. I do not say this to minimise those stories. I say it because the mechanism matters. Administrative error, partisan local misconduct and an institution-wide conspiracy are three different claims requiring three different standards of proof.
The BJP’s response, reported by The Indian Express, has been predictably combative: Congress is blaming the process for its own losses. There is political spin in that reply, certainly, but there is also an uncomfortable question Congress avoids. If manipulation explains its defeats, what explains its victories under the same institutional architecture? Indian voters have repeatedly produced split verdicts, punished incumbents and backed different parties at national and state levels. A machine designed to ensure one party’s permanent triumph has a remarkably independent-minded operating system.
Congress keeps outsourcing introspection
Congress has spent a decade developing explanations that require everybody except Congress to change. The media are unfair, institutions are captured, regional allies are selfish, voters are misled, technology is suspicious and election administrators are compromised. Some criticisms contain truth. No institution deserves devotional faith. Yet the cumulative pattern is unmistakable: external explanations arrive much faster than internal audits of organisation, candidate selection, local leadership, ideological coherence or Rahul Gandhi’s political judgment.
I read budget documents for fun, an affliction that has at least taught me to prefer dull evidence over exciting insinuation. Elections are won through coalitions assembled street by street: welfare delivery, caste arithmetic, candidate reputation, booth workers, message discipline and trust. The BJP invested in these unglamorous systems for years. Congress often behaves as though a televised accusation can compensate for a hollow district organisation. It cannot. One can criticise the BJP’s centralisation while still admitting that it treats election management as serious work rather than a seasonal moral crusade.
The most revealing part of Congress’s argument is its scale. A narrowly framed complaint could be tested and perhaps proved. A nationwide allegation of democratic theft is emotionally satisfying precisely because it becomes difficult to falsify. Every correction can be called a cover-up; every demand for particulars can be portrayed as complicity. This is not accountability. It is a self-sealing theory, and liberal commentators who repeat it without demanding constituency-level evidence are not protecting democracy. They are lowering the evidentiary standard for claims about democracy.
The Commission still has work to do
Giving the Election Commission the benefit of the doubt does not mean granting it immunity from criticism. The Commission should publish clearer revision protocols, machine-readable deletion and addition data, reasons for rejection, appeal timelines and periodic error audits. It should communicate in plain language rather than bureaucratic Sanskrit. Where documentation requirements disproportionately burden migrants, tenants, women or poor citizens, correction camps and assisted verification must be designed around their realities. Confidence grows from visible procedures, not institutional indignation.
The government, too, should resist the temptation to treat every critic as an enemy of the republic. When thousands of citizens fear disenfranchisement, ministers gain little by sounding triumphant. The correct right-of-centre response is institutional: insist upon evidence, strengthen remedies and make the process easier to inspect. A confident government should want auditable rolls because legitimacy is an asset, not a concession to Congress. Police handling of protests must also remain proportionate; criticism of an allegation does not erase the right to peaceful assembly.
That is where I part company with the loudest defenders of the establishment. They sometimes argue as though acknowledging one wrongful deletion would vindicate the entire opposition narrative. It would not. Large systems make errors. Mature institutions find and repair them. The Commission should welcome documented challenges, disclose what it changes and punish officials who knowingly violate rules. Such openness would do more for public confidence than a hundred partisan press conferences.
A democracy cannot run on vibes
The counterargument is that demanding granular proof places an impossible burden on citizens while the state controls the data. There is force in that point. The Commission therefore owes parties timely access to rolls, revision records and appeal outcomes. Civil-society researchers should be able to examine patterns without scraping hostile websites. But once those records are available, political leaders must do the difficult work of analysis. They cannot leap from several alarming examples to a predetermined national verdict.
I also reject the convenient idea that scepticism toward Congress’s case amounts to blind faith in the BJP. My position is simpler: extraordinary allegations need proportionate evidence, whichever party makes them. If tomorrow the BJP loses a state and claims an opposition government manipulated rolls, I would ask it for the same booth-wise documentation. Electoral legitimacy cannot depend on whether my preferred party won. The standard must survive a reversal of political fortune.
Congress would serve itself better by treating verified omissions as a practical campaign. Help citizens file claims. Publish clean datasets. Train booth agents. Take strong cases to court. Secure remedies. That work is slower than declaring democracy dead, but it might restore actual votes and demonstrate administrative competence. It might even force the Election Commission to improve. What it will not do is provide a theatrical explanation for every defeat, which may be why the party seems less interested in it.
The INDIA alliance has every right to challenge power. Indeed, a government benefits from an opposition capable of finding real failures. But opposition politics becomes unserious when accusation is mistaken for achievement. Voters can simultaneously dislike bureaucratic errors, demand safeguards and reject Congress. That possibility appears unbearable to a party still sustained by memories of natural entitlement. Democracy is not validated only when Congress wins.
My verdict is therefore deliberately unfashionable. Investigate every credible deletion. Make the Commission more transparent. Protect peaceful dissent. Then ask Congress to prove the sweeping claim it has chosen to make. Until it does, I will not confuse amplified suspicion with established fact. India’s electoral system is too important to be defended by complacency, but it is also too important to be convicted by vibes.
